‘Dances With Wolves’ In Space: Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ Gets Visuals Right, Everything Else Wrong

by Carl Kozlowski

Imagine the story of a soldier sent to fight native tribes for their land, but finds that once he actually meets and gets to know them, he respects them too much to follow through with his mission. Gradually he becomes one of the tribe, leaving his old way of life behind to embrace their nature-loving culture.

You might think you’ve just read the synopsis for Kevin Costner’s Oscar-winning classic “Dances With Wolves.” But it’s actually also the core plot of another Oscar-winning director’s new film: James Cameron’s “Avatar.”

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The fact that “Avatar” is basically “Dances With Wolves in Space” represents the film’s major flaw. For despite being the most expensive film of all time, with a $300 million production cost and another estimated $200 million spent on advertising, “Avatar” is also one of the most derivative films of all time. It’s hard to believe that a man like Cameron (“Terminator 2,” “Titanic”), who is capable of absolute genius in creating the film’s staggering visuals and astonishing breakthroughs in 3D IMAX technology, is unable to come up with a screenplay that isn’t a hamfisted mishmash of countless better films’ plot elements and a heavy-handed bash on modern American foreign policy.

The film is set in 2154, with the earth environmentally ravaged and a governmental outfit called the Resources Development Administration spending mountains of money to mine the distant moon of Pandora for a rare-earth mineral essential to solving the earth’s energy crisis, called Unobtainium (nice subtlety, Cameron). The RDA has been trying for 30 years, but has faced growing conflict with the indigenous master race of the planet, called the Na’vi, and the two sides appear to be heading towards a brutal war over Pandora’s resources.

The RDA’s last-ditch attempt to avoid war and negotiate for the right to mine is the Avatar Program, which human scientists have created to build a “bridge of trust” with the Na’vi by employing genetically engineered avatar bodies to walk among these alien giants by resembling them. Basically, human participants in the Avatar Program – led by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and a former soldier named Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) – strap themselves into chambers that resemble tanning beds and enter a sleep-like trance in which their consciousness enters the form of alternate, or “avatar”, beings that resemble the Na’vi.

The goal is for these avatar forces to provide intelligence about how the Na’vi live and think over a three-month period, with the information intended to help the humans outwit them either in negotiations or on the battlefield. But major problems arise when Sully finds himself saved from certain death at the claws of a monstrous Pandoran creature by a beautiful Na’vi woman named Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).

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As he’s learning about her life, he falls for both Neytiri and her culture, prompting him to beg his fellow humans to peacefully negotiate a deal with the Na’vi for their resources. But the leader of the RDA mercenary forces, Col. Miles Quattrich (Stephen Lang in a deliciously hammy performance that ranks with the all-time great movie bad guys), decides to skip the talking and take Pandora by force via the violent decimation of the moon’s two sacred trees. Forced to choose sides, Sully sticks with the Na’vi, leading to some of the most epic battle scenes ever committed to film.

Cameron knows how to dazzle visually, covering Pandora with a seemingly endless array of gorgeous vegetation and alternately beautiful and horrifying creatures. And when the time comes, he delivers battle scenes that drew jaw-dropping gasps and even applause from the audience at an advance screening.

But these terrific elements are ultimately dragged down by the fact that Cameron’s screenplay seems to be cobbled together with derivative elements of many other films, even aside from “Wolves.” There are two resurrection-style scenes that seem cribbed from Cameron’s own underrated 1989 film “The Abyss,” and when the RDA mercenaries come crashing in for their initial attack on the Na’vi, much of the assault appeared lifted from “Apocalypse Now.”

Add in the fact that the Na’vi simply appear to be blue-hued Native Americans with tails, and that their worship service to a god named Eywu (a name that resembles Yahweh when spoken in the film, in yet another unsubtle touch) seems like it could be set to Elton John’s “Circle of Life,” and the hokum factor adds up fast.

But worst of all is the fact that the RDA forces dress, look and act like US Marines, and their assaults play out like a greatest-hits collection of America’s worst military atrocities, from napalm-style bombings to driving the Na’vi away in a sequence that resembles depictions of the Native Americans’ Trail of Tears. Col. Quattrich resembles Donald Rumsfeld in both appearance and tone, particularly a ridiculously heavy-handed speech in which he tells his forces of the need for “pre-emptive war” to get what they want, and another character’s statement that the military assault will be “shock and awe.”

SPOILER ALERT: It all adds up to crossing a line that I’ve never experienced in a major American film: drawing the audience to cheer the brutal deaths of Americans who are clearly symbolizing the military. The RDA forces are shot, thrown off their planes, crushed by heavy objects and eaten by Pandora’s flying creatures, as their helicopters are brought crashing down in flames.

Which leads me to wonder who really wrote this overpriced pile of cliches and anti-Americanism – James Cameron or famed radical-left historian Howard Zinn? I’ve defended movies like “Brothers,” which some conservatives branded as anti-troop because it depicts the tragedy of post-traumatic stress disorder on the life of a US soldier and his family, but “Avatar” takes its message into almost outright hatred of our forces while hiding behind the slightest of smokescreens in its bare mention that they’re “mercenaries.”

Call a spade a spade, and call a uniformed fighting force composed entirely of Americans and led by a Colonel the military. Why couldn’t Cameron have left his agenda at home and crafted a non-political story in which Americans could be heroes, as they have been in countless situations anyone can agree on, even assuming Iraq is divisive? The curiosity factor will enable “Avatar” to open with monstrous numbers at the box office this weekend, but I’ve got a strong feeling that it will fail fast – or at least fall well-short of expectations for the director of the largest-grossing film of all time, “Titanic” – once the heartland and anyone else who has loved ones in the military finds their stomachs turned by the coal-black heart of this film.


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Posted Dec 17th 2009 at 5:01 am in Featured Story, Film, Reviews | 508 Comments